Founder and Editor of The Lanchester Review. Previous or occasional contributor to Prime Politics, Comment is Free, The First Post/The Week, Harry's Place, New Directions, The Brussels Journal, The London Progressive Journal, Labour Uncut, The American Conservative and Russia Today (RT). Available for work via davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, all lower case.

Friday, 30 December 2011

The Provisional Prime Minister

Margaret Thatcher was an unprotesting Cabinet Minister at the time of this country's only ever attempt to withdraw entirely from Ireland.

It is no surprise that she seriously considered making the same move. Nor is there anything new in the realisation that she was in constant contact with the IRA, giving it every reason to place its highest hopes in her.

How else did you think that she mysteriously "escaped" from the Brighton Bomb? It is time to look into that strange just-failure to blow her up, leading to her "heroic" and "miraculous" escape, a key part of her legend.

8 comments:

You'll get yourself in a lot of trouble telling high table tales like that on this here internet, Mr. L. Then again, you have no doubt been authorised one way or another. She always was far too close to Washington and Israel for their tastes, and as you know the first of those relationships accounted for how the CIA's paid terrorists against Britain strangely just failed to hit her.

I'm beginning to believe that Mr Lindsay cannot actually be a Catholic, so careless of the truth are his comments. To tout a lie like his about Mrs Thatcher is simply wicked. A dozen people were killed in that bomb and she would have been one of them had the man who placed the bomb not placed it in a bathroom months before rooms were allocated and therefore randomly killed wives and a member of the Tory Whips Office and seriously injured Norman Tebbit and his wife. However much you hate Mrs Thatcher, this is an allegation which disgraced your blog. It has no truth whatsoever.

What "allegation"? A question cannot be an allegation. And as of today, it is established once and for all as we all knew already: Thatcher was in continuous contact with the IRA, giving it every reason to have high hopes of her. A certain amount of investigation is very definitely called for.

A man who doesn't know where revisionism and contrarianism need to stop, and who, like many a left-wing hack before him, spends far too much time dining and drinking with the country house Old Right. This is where that ends up.

A Prime Minister whose father had been a prominent local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around, sent her to a fee-paying school, and put her through Oxford without a scholarship, but whose daughter turned even that section of society from people like her father into people like her son.

Britain turned into the country that Marxists had always said it was, even though, before her, it never actually had been: "This is where that ends up," indeed.

Let me quote the great man in the comments on a post elsewhere about Thatcher’s ironing board:

"On here, that [the Tebbit question] is not really a question for me, is it?

As of today, any remaining doubt in anyone’s mind can be no more: it is established once and for all that she was in constant contact with the IRA and quite open to giving it whatever it wanted. She did, of course, go on to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

If we still had political journalism in this country, then that, not least in relation to the IRA’s oddly close-but-no-cigar assassination attempt, would today be the biggest story in decades. But we have glorified gossip columnists instead. So it is all about ironing boards."

In reply to a description of her very wealthy and powerful father as a "greengrocer":

"He was not a "greengrocer". He is more accurately seen as the last Victorian Liberal commercial baron from the provinces to exercise national political influence, albeit vicariously and posthumously through his daughter's memories of him. Landed Tories used to call them greengrocers, too."

Now, I need to head back over there, in order to correct someone who has suggested that Thatcher was thrifty because she was a product of a state grammar school. She would sometimes construct sentences in such a way as to give the impression that she was. But she was not. Her very wealthy and powerful father had taken care of that.

About Me

Founder, Proprietor, Publisher and Editor of The Lanchester Review since 2013. Founder, Proprietor (for now), Publisher (for now) and Editor-in-Chief of Lanchester Books since 2014. Charity volunteer and administrator since 1994. Freelance journalist since 1996. Supply teacher and market research worker from 2002 until prevented by disability. Member of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham since 2006. Preventing the University of Durham’s undergraduates’ degrees from getting the way of their education since 2000.
Elected Parish Councillor from the age of 21 until I stood down voluntarily in 2013. During that time, Lanchester was among the first in the country to secure power of wellbeing, power of general competence, and Quality Parish Council Status.
At 21, I began eight years as a governor of a primary school which, at the time of my appointment, still had the same Headteacher as when I had been a pupil there. Three weeks short of 22, I found myself in the same position when I began eight years as a governor of a comprehensive school.
Since May 2013, a member of the Durham’s Police and Crime Commissioner's Community Panel.